The Piano Tuner Quotes

In one corner the piano tuner scattered arpeggios live handfuls of beads.

The conversations rests uneasily; one doesn't expect good-byes to be burdened by such trivialities. This is not how it is in the books, he thinks, or in the theater, and he feels the need to speak of mission, of duty, of love. They reach home and close the door and he doesn't drop her hand. Where speech fails, touch compensates.

At times I wonder if the reason I have lost track of time is that I will know when to return not by a date, but when an emptiness is filled.

What are you afraid of then?' She pondered. He had already noticed that it was her hands which indicated what she was thinking of quite as much as her face and now he watched as she cupped them, making them ready to receive her thoughts. 'Not being able to see, I think,' she said. 'Being blind, you mean?' 'No, not that. That would be terrible hard but Homer managed it and our blind piano tuner is one of the serenest people I know. I mean ... not seeing because you're obsessed by something that blots out the world. Some sort of mania of belief. Or passion. That awful kind of love that makes leaves and birds and cherry blossom invisible because it's not the face on some man.

White. Like a clean piece of paper, like uncarved ivory, all is white when the story begins.

being needed was not the same as being accepted.

Yet complicated people were getting wet - not only the shepherds. For instance, the piano-tuner was sopping. So was the vicar's wife. So were the lieutenant and the peevish damsels in his Battlesden car. Gallantry, charity, and art pursued their various missions, perspiring and muddy, while out on the slopes beyond them stood the eternal man and the eternal dog, guarding eternal sheep until the world is vegetarian.

that being needed was not the same as being accepted.

war. A balanced peace is a poor fertilizer for promotion.

One learns a lot if others assume you are deaf to their tongue.

Perhaps he has seen what I will,

good piano tuner must have knowledge not only of his instrument but of “Physics, Philosophy, and Poetics,” so that Edgar, although he never attended university, reached his twentieth birthday with more education than many who had.

Music heard with you at home or in the car or even while strolling didn’t always sound as pristine as piano tuners might wish— it was sometimes mixed with voices full of fear and pain, and then that music was more than music, it was our living and our dying.

Her thoughts became mysteriously tightened and strung up as if a piano tuner had put his key in her back and stretched the nerves very taut

In poche righe le confessava le sue emozioni dicendo di essersi sentito "come nell'Allegro con Brio della Sonata 50 in Re Maggiore di Haydn".

Essere necessari non significa essere accettati.

others.

È una storia di sogni, gridò, sono tutte storie di sogni.

Clementi, Sonata in Fa Diesis Minore, Opera 25, Numero 5" disse Katherine, e lui annuì. Una volta le aveva spiegato che quella sonata evocava in lui l'immagine di un uomo perduto in mezzo al mare mentre la sua innamorata lo aspetta sulla riva.

I was once on a BBC current-affairs show and the sneering host produced a Solzhenitsyn quote designed to demonstrate that my view of American pre-eminence was all hooey, and rounded it out with a snide “I take it you’ve heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?” “Oh, sure,” I said. “We have the same piano tuner.” Which we did.

The wife he had first chosen had dressed drably: from silence and inflexious--more than from words--he learned that now. Her grey hair straggled to her shoulders, her back was a little humped. He poked his way about, and they were two old people when they went out on their rounds, older than they were in their ageless happiness. She wouldn't have hurt a fly, she wasn't a person you could be jealous of, yet of course it was hard on a new wife to be haunted by happiness, to be challenged by the simplicities there had been. He had given himself to two women; he hadn't withdrawn from the first, he didn't from the second. Each house that contained a piano brought forth its contradictions. The pearls old Mrs. Putrill wore were opals, the pallid skin of the stationer in Kiliath was freckled, the two lines of oaks above Oghill were surely beeches? 'Of course, of course,' Owen Dromgould agreed, since it was fair that he should do so. Belle could not be blamed for making her claim, and claims could not be made without damage or destruction. Belle would win in the end because the living always do. And that seemed fair also, since Violet had won in the beginning, and had had the better years." --"The Piano Tuner's Wives

A piano tuner used to come over to our house when I was young. He was a blind man, his eyes burnt-out holes in his head, his body all bent. I remember how strange he looked against the grandeur of our lives, how he stooped over that massive multitoothed instrument and tweaked its tones. The piano never looked any different after he’d worked on it, but when I pressed a C key or the black bar of an F minor, the note sprung out richer, as though chocolate and spices had been added to a flat sound. This was what was different. It was as though I’d been visited by a blind piano tuner who had crept into my apartment at night, who had tweaked the ivory bones of my body, the taut strings in my skull, and now, when I pressed on myself, the same notes but with a mellower, fuller sound sprang out.

You really are amazing,” he said again, not caring that his voice was low and perhaps a little too intimate. At his words, she sucked in a sharp breath that made her chest rise. She mumbled an excuse about needing to discuss something with the piano tuner. Guy stood unmoving at the pulpit and watched her walk gracefully away and speak kindly to the tuner still at the piano. Guy couldn’t stop himself from staring, even though he was flustered at the thought that he was acting like an untried youth rather than the experienced once-married man he was. “God help me,” he whispered, finally tearing his attention away from Miss Pendleton to focus once more on his sermon notes. He liked her. Much more than he should.

There is a Shan saying that when people die it is because they have done what they needed to, because they are too good for this world. I

It was not for the piano-tuner to know that in this still, grey, winter-gripped dining-room, this apparent mortuary of desire and passion (in which the lift rumbled and knives and forks scraped upon plates), waves were flowing forward and backward, and through and through, of hellish revulsion and unquenchable hatred!

Thinking that coding is the nerdy IT guy at work rebooting your computer is like thinking that music is what happens when the piano tuner comes round.

Nash, who carried in his head a sort of social ladder, had quietly decided that police officers of all ranks were to be graded with piano tuners.

As Epstein writes: “How many households are in New York? What portion might have pianos? How often are pianos tuned? How long might it take to tune a piano? How many homes can one tuner reach in a day? How many days a year does a tuner work?” You won’t guess it exactly, but you’ll be much more likely to be in the ballpark. As Epstein writes, “None of the individual estimates has to be particularly accurate in order to get a reasonable overall answer.

A Fermi problem is one like this: “How many piano tuners are there in New York City?” You have to estimate the size of something about which you are totally ignorant.

Can you describe for me the tastes that you experienced as you said those words?" "Certainly. Mashed peas, dried apples, wine gum, weak tea, butter unsalted, Walkers crisps..."Mr. Roland replied. What I was experiencing at that moment wasn't an out-of-body experience. It was an in-another-body experience. Everything but this man and me had faded into darkness. He and I were at the two ends of a brightly lit tunnel. We were point A and point B. The tunnel was the most direct, straight-line route between the two points. I had never experienced recognition in this pure, undiluted form. It was a mirroring. It was a fact. It was a cord pulled taut between us. Most of all, it was no longer a secret. I don't remember getting up, but I must have. I do remember kneeling in front of the TV. I touched the image of Mr. Roland's face as his words jumped, swerved, coalesced, attacked, and revealed. As the interview continued, he became more comfortable with the interviewer, and his facial tics and rapid blinking lessened. He masked what he couldn't control by taking long sips from a glass of water (or perhaps the clear liquid was gin). He also turned his head slightly and coughed into his left hand, which provided him with a second or two of privacy. It soon became clear to Mr. Roland and to me that the interviewer wanted him to perform for the camera. After each question-and-answer exchange, the interviewer would ask him for the tastes of her words and then his. Mr. Roland was oddly obliging, much more so than I would have been in his position. I soon realized that his pool of experiential flavors, in other words his actual food intake, was very British and that he didn't venture far from home for his gastronomical needs. "Curry fries" was the most unusual taste that this piano tuner from Manchester listed. The word "employment" triggered it, he told the interviewer. I said "employment" aloud and tasted olives from a can, which meant I tasted more can than olives. I felt more than a tinge of envy.